Finding the Source of Love

What is love? Isn't it amazing that the most important thing in the world is the least understood?

We are better acquainted with the absence of love, or the misuse of love, or the betrayal of love than we are love resplendent. Then what is the problem? Why do we have so much difficulty experiencing spectacular love?

The key question is: Where does love come from? That is an extremely baffling and confusing question. Does love come from somewhere or someone else? Actually, both are true. Love comes, ultimately from everything and everyone. Yet if we seek to make that our sole source of love, we will live a life of constant disappointment. What if the people around me are incapable of giving me the love I need? What if nature becomes hostile rather than beautiful, evoking fear rather than radiating love? We become bereft and forlorn.

Although love comes from everything and everyone, the only source of love that we can count on is from ourselves. Only when we find the source of love from within ourselves can we find a constant source not dependent upon other people and things. But that becomes a hall of mirrors, too!


We have a lot of stuff going on within ourselves that interferes with our experience of the well-spring of love deep within us. The most difficult thing to control in the universe is our mind. Our mind constantly seeks to find the course of least resistance, to find a place where there is no pain and only comfort resides. Our mind tries to create an image of ourselves that makes us happy and avoids pain. We often end up living life in an illusion rather than tapping into the well-spring of love that constantly flows deep within our soul.

Love comes from the deepest well-spring of our soul. Yet, if we stop there, we have still stopped short. If we look for love only in the depths of our soul, only in ourself, we are trying to fix on a moving point. If we look for love only within ourself, we have stopped just short of the real source of love.

The real source of love is beyond ourself. Yet the only way to find that love beyond ourself is by going through ourself. That is extremely tricky! Yet the goal is well worth the struggle. If we succeed in finding the source of love through our mind and heart, yet beyond them, we enter into the infinite source and creator of love, God. We discover God within ourselves as the portal to the infinite God who is love.


God is the source of love and the creator of love. Only when our love is set firm in God's love within ourself yet beyond ourself will we find the power to love others in a way that transforms them, that transforms ourselves.

Real love, true love, love that originates in God within and beyond us, is a revolutionary force, a creative force. When we tap into that love, we become someone who is able to love others even if we are not loved in return. We become people who can forgive those who have offended us, who have scorned our love, who have disrespected our person.

Forgiveness is the most difficult of all acts, especially when someone has violated our trust, our love, our pride. Finding the power to forgive those who have violated us is only possible when we receive our love from beyond ourself in God. During a time of violent and hateful struggle in India between Hindu and Muslim, Gandhi meet with a Hindu man who had just killed a Muslim child. He had killed him out of rage for the murder of his son by a Muslim. The Hindu sought Gandhi's help to find a way out of his torment. Gandhi told him to find a Muslim boy whose parents had been killed in the rioting and raise the boy as his own.

Surely that advice rates right up there with Solomon's judgment in the dispute between two women who both claimed the same baby. He ordered the baby cut in two, and half given to each. The mother who begged for the baby's life, asking Solomon to give it to the other, proved the real mother. Real love is the willingness to lose the person rather than see them die. (1 Kings 3:26)



Giving up your life for another is the highest form of love. As Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) It is no coincidence that the Medal of Honor is given to soldiers who throw themselves on a hand grenade to save his fellow. Measure that against the act of strapping a bomb under your clothing to blow up women, children, elderly, and youth in a crowded market place.

Most of us count on others to feel love; our parents, our brothers and sisters, our children, our friends. If some how they do not show us love, we feel unloved, we become depressed and angry or withdrawn. Most violent crimes are between people who know each other, often because one feels unloved or their love has been violated.

Yet, when we know the truth, that love comes from within ourself, even beyond ourself, rather than from others, we focus on our power to love rather than on being loved. We understand that the greatest transforming power in the world is love. We realize that we possess the power to transform others and ourselves through the power of love. Rather than
victims who are unloved, we are champions of love who change the world around us through that power.

All You Need Is Love

North Korea tested a nuclear bomb and a few missiles. They revoked the truce in place since 1953. Nuclear war on the Korean peninsula is looming. Pakistan has counter attacked the Taliban, holding them off for the time being from conquering Islamabad and capturing its nuclear arsenal. Iran marches steadily and rapidly toward creating its own nuclear missiles. Israel has pledged to strike before that happens. Sure sounds like Armageddon to me.

The nuclear drama is taking place with the backdrop of a world wide global depression. The world's governments have been acting quickly to avert a complete meltdown of the financial institutions. Whether we will or not remains to be seen.

The Swine Flu has sent fear through the world's communities. WHO rang the alarm bell. It had the appearance of a false alarm, bringing criticism upon its leaders who assure us a pandemic will happen.

What in the world is happening? Are we witnessing the end of the world? No. Just the approach of the end of history. Many have designated 2012 as the year history ends.

What does that mean, the end of history? It sure sounds a lot like the end of the world. The end of history denotes a monumental turning point in our communal life on the earth. Some have called it dooms day and others the beginning of the Kingdom of God.

In either case, the end of history is a turning point. We face several enormous challenges before 2012. How we deal with them will determine whether we experience an apocalypse or a step over the threshold into the kingdom of God.

The central challenge is whether or not we can love one another. I know, that sounds a lot like the hippie slogan of the 1960s. Yet it really does come down to that. Can we love, forgive, and embrace one another? Can we live in peace in mutual prosperity, community, and mutual love?

We are at a turning point, a decisive moment of history. We have in our hands the power to turn the earth into a cinder or into a Garden of Eden. We have the ability to herald the angels of peace or the angels of destruction. Everything is in our hands. Love. "All you need is love" as the Beatles sang.

Who are the children of peace? The children of peace are the children of God. Who are the children of God? The children of God are the followers of Krishna, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Baihai Báb, Joseph Smith, Sun Myung Moon, and on and on. All true religious leaders teach love of God and love of each other. We have teachings enough to live in peace if each of us takes the religious teachings we hold dear and live them.

North Korea poses an especially difficult challenge. A communist atheistic totalitarian dictatorship on the verge of possessing a quiver full of nuclear arrows, love may not be enough to disarm them. The united world community may have to devastate North Korea before it harms its neighbors.

One way or another, when we celebrate the new year 2012, we will have crossed the threshold of a new history, the era of cooperation among the nations and religions of the world. That will not come automatically. We will have decades of struggle to see a coming together of the children of God of all stripes. God and the angelic world will help. They have decided that there is no turning back. We will see the Kingdom of God on the earth, even if we have to experience nuclear war, plague, and famine along the way.

The Ghosts of Woodstock

August 14 to 16, 1969.

I wonder if you have noticed that this year is the year of Anniversaries? 400 years ago, Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River. 200 years ago, Robert Fulton sailed The Steamship along the same Hudson River. And 40 years ago today, the three day Peace Fest began in Bethel, NY, named Woodstock. All those events took place just outside my Window on the Hudson.

When Hudson sailed the Half Moon up the river that now bares his name, Native Americans who had lived in the region for 12,000 years saw the strange creature move up the river like an ancient sea monster. His voyage marked the beginning of a new age in the New World, the age of European colonization in the region.


In 1809, Robert Fulton received the first patent for his steam boat. In 1807, he had sailed the Clarmont up the Hudson River claimed by the newly founded United States of America, wrested from the sovereignty of the British just twenty years before. Fulton's voyage heralded the beginning of a new age for the New Nation, the age of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1969, August 14 to 16, another epic event nearby the shores of the Hudson River, the mega outdoor peace revival in the tradition of the camp revivals more than a hundred years before, took place. Hundreds of thousands of youth gravitated together in the quest for peace in a three day music fest. That event launched the voyage of a million ships, people throughout the world who had been awakened to the hope of peace in our time. That marked the beginning of another revolution in the USA, the Peace Revolution.


I lived during the Woodstock event in another place so today I see the ghosts of Woodstock rather than real memories. The ghosts who hoped for peace, yet sought that through unbridled license. During the time of Hudson, and the time of Fulton, Asia knew the kind of peace that the ghosts of Woodstock sought. They sought peace through the use of opium and courtesans. The peace of the Chinese aristocrats, sexual freedom and opium, had become the peace of American youth.

How in the world did we get peace and freedom confused with drugs and illicit sex? How in the world did we become so very confused? Why did so many of us cast away common decency in the name of freedom and love and peace? What set the conditions for that great delusion?

Peace had been in the air. Our parents' generation had been engaged in a life and death struggle with Fascism in Europe and Asia. They had no illusion about the way peace would come to the world. Peace would come through the barrel of a cannon and values worth living and dying for, not through the hashish water pipe and sexual abandon. After victory had been declared over the armies of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the world geared up for another war, a more subtle and difficult to understand war. The war for peoples' hearts, minds, and souls erupted in the life and death struggle between international communism and democratic capitalism.



Here came the rub, though. The sermon of communist preachers---that we are all brothers and that we should do away with greed, ownership of property, and live like saints, giving to others according to our ability and receiving according to our need---struck a cord with what the Woodstock generation knew to be true. What is, indeed, true. God implanted that desire in every person's heart!

Yet, although we believed in our hearts that message, something seemed wrong about the preacher. Like Elmer Gantry, preaching with a tongue of fire while living a life of selfish seduction, the communist preachers seemed to have another agenda. Rather than set us free from our chains, they desired to chain us. Rather than free the people from opium that befuddled us, they sought to befuddle us with opium. Rather than show us the way of love towards all people, they showed the way of infidelity and broken hearts. They offered a dream of peace, love, and freedom but gave us a nightmare of murder, death, and slavery.

Yet the dream still lives because the message is true, although the messenger was a false prophet. In our hearts we know that peace, love, and freedom are the highest ideals. Our hearts did not betray us, we betrayed our hearts. The ghosts of Woodstock would have us believe that drugs, free sex, and communism will set us free, will bring us peace, and will blossom love in our hearts. How very, very wrong they are. They gave us drug addiction, broken families, and lives of unbridled license.


Banish those ghosts! In their place, let the heavenly hosts enter triumphantly! They herald a peace, love, and freedom that comes through holiness, through living as the children of God. The Heavenly Hosts will usher us into another Revolution on the Hudson. They speak to our knowing hearts of love between all people of all religions, of all races, of all ages, of all nations. Not a love couched in drugs and illicit sex, but a love embracing the sanctity of families as well as the sacredness of the person. There we will find the cornerstone of peace, love, and freedom, not in the ghosts of Woodstock.